Bob Moore obituary

The Guardian

31-03-2025

My friend Bob Moore , who has died aged 83, taught medieval history at the University of Sheffield from 1964 to 1994, and then at the University of Newcastle until his retirement in 2003. He was also known to many as RI Moore, the name under which he wrote as a historian.
In 1987, he published The Formation of a Persecuting Society. Unusually for a book on medieval history, its second edition was the subject of a Guardian column by Madeleine Bunting in 2007. Its fresh and iconoclastic insights into the roots of intolerance in modern society remain sharply relevant today, and a third edition is in preparation. Bob's subsequent work on the persecution of religious heretics, culminating in The War on Heresy (2012), provoked considerable debate, and won him an important reputation internationally, especially in France.
In 2000, he published The First European Revolution, which was, and still is, routinely taught in UK universities – and continues to electrify students. Its argument was that the history of European society, as opposed to classical civilisation, began around the year 1000. Bob was convinced that the Middle Ages were not a remote period of time cut off from our own world that could safely be ignored, but rather should be considered as laying the foundations for modernity.
Bob was also a pioneer in the field of world history. Decades before British universities began to modify their teaching of history, Bob introduced an ambitious global history curriculum for all history students at the University of Sheffield in 1985, called World Civilisations, 600-1900, which he then took with him to Newcastle. As the founding editor of the Blackwell History of the World series, he commissioned and published enormously influential studies, including Chris Bayly's The Birth of the Modern World.
Born in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, to Elsie (nee Ellis) and Thomas Moore, a civil servant, Bob studied at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, and then went to Merton College, Oxford, to study history, graduating in 1962.
He was appointed to his first academic post in Sheffield at the age of 23, before completing his DPhil. He became an experienced university administrator and was in the running at one point to become vice-chancellor at Soas University of London.
He was married twice, first in 1968 to Wendy Jenrick, with whom he had three children; the marriage ended in divorce. In 2002 he married Elizabeth Redgate. He was a convivial host, with a taste for fine wine, a ruthless streak in backgammon, and a side interest in computer games. He was also an inspiring teacher and colleague.
Bob is survived by Elizabeth, his children, Olivia, Richard and Gerald, and his sister, Frances.